Updates on the Popcorn project

Popcorn 0.9

Among the many developments in the popcorn community (such as the Europeana Remix project and the announcement of our Living Docs partnership with ITVS), the last several weeks have seen much discussion and hacking towards the 0.9 release of popcorn. Over 53 tickets were completed for this release (see our changelog).

Most importantly, this release signals the freeze in the popcorn core API. This freeze comes with a promise: everything developed from here outwards with popcorn won’t break in future releases. The many tests we run for each release back this up.

Here are some key features, as highlighted by the projects core developers:

Shorthand for play and pause. You can now seek to a time and play/pause it by doing popcorn.play( 3 ) or popcorn.pause( 4 ) as opposed to the old popcorn.currentTime( 3 ).play()

We have provided alias’ for start( in ) and end( out ). These are familiar terms for film makers, so this should provide them with a more natural feel when developing popcorn tracks.

The players underwent a complete re-write courtesy of Scott Downe. All players now derive from the baseplayer, which in turn reduces the amount of code in subsequent players, reducing the chance for bugs. This also made testing easier as the previous player tests were a nightmare. Currently only youtube has been re-written, but vimeo, soundcloud and a new jwPlayer ( by karim ) will coming out alongside 1.0. To use youtube with Popcorn, the old way was: popcorn = Popcorn( Popcorn.youtube( “div”, “urlToVideo” ) ); and the new way is simply: popcorn = Popcorn.youtube( “div”, “urlToVideo” ).

A destroy function has been added, extending a function to the users for destroying a current instance of popcorn. This will remove all event listeners and prevent any further track event updating.

RequestAnimationFrame was added in this release. This allows for much more precise timing of events, as its on a per frame basis ( 30 frames per second I think ).This gives film makers (and all developers) a great deal more control over when events are fired.

Plugins went through a complete style guide clean up and are now looking nice and pretty.

exec also was given and alias, called cue, which further provides familiar terms to film makers

Stay tuned for even bigger news as we prepare for the most important release of all – 1.0!